The current GS Extend repo is (a bit of) a mess: half of the plugins are outdated, the star ratings aren't very indicative of quality, and some plugins are just outright noise.
I think it's a much needed feature to be able to maintain / contribute to plugins that are no longer under active development, but still have valuable functionality/ valuable concepts, or just increase collaboration overall.

Currently there are 4 ways (with major drawbacks) to do this:

Create a new plugin in GS Extend, with slightly different wording (e.g. news manager 2, 'new custom fields', or alike). However, this only adds more confusion to the mess.

Upload a modified version in attachment of the plugin's community forum (supposing there is one).
However, 90% of potentially interested users will miss out on this and it lacks officical update status.

Request account access of the owner of the plugin (if, and that's a big IF, (s)he's still around and agrees to do so).
Secrity-wise the worst solution ever.

Contribute to the Git repo and have the owner of the plugin do the Extend updates (if, and that's a big IF, the owner is still around, and responsive). I've been doing this for a while with a couple of HelgeSverre's plugins (Plugin installer, Password Protect).

As long as GS Extend is featured as the 'official plugin repository', it needs (apart from a working search):

The ability to authorize plugin maintainers/ contributors by the owner

Or/ And the ability to transfer ownership of a plugin

Alternatively, GS Extend could be shut (I don't like this option), and individual plugin authors encouraged to use Git and Git releases (but this considerably heightens the barrier to initial contribution), or some central repo of verified plugins could be set up..

What are your thoughts? And also, and especially, what is reasonably doable?

The file upload page in Extend could have an extra field with a link to an external repository. Seems easy to implement. Although in that case you might want to show other data from the external repo as well..

There could also be a field which describes the license used for the plugin.

And a field where you could link to an existing plugin. ( "This plugins code is based on plugin: " )

So that this info is better structured instead of possibly written somewhere in the plugins description..
The first idea will also encourage people to host their code elsewhere, so that a future closure of the Extend repo will not be so abrubt, since most people have already hosting it elsewhere.

(2017-10-13, 17:59:58)HelgeSverre Wrote: Doesn't sound like a very difficult task to undertake.

If we build something ala packagist or plain use packagist with "tags" or prefixes, then build a (or use my existing) plugin installer to point it to the new location of plugins

Thanks for chiming in! As Shawn mentioned, it will likely result in replacing current GS Extend.
Although the task might not be difficult, it will be time-consuming.
And you clearly have a better idea on how to start than I do, but I will gladly contribute. Keep me posted